Choosing and Optimizing Content

Choosing and Optimizing Content for your Website

Today I want to talk about optimizing content on your website. First, if you’re not doing content marketing then you’re essentially not marketing your business.

What is Content and Why do You Need It?

Content can be videos, infographics, various written formats, structure pages blogs, etc. that appear on your website. It can be a variety of things. Regardless of the type of content, the purpose of content is to get the message out about your products and services. Content answers the question: why we should I choose you? Content needs to be created on a continual basis.

Creating and optimizing content is necessary for a couple of reasons. First optimizing content is good for SEO or organic results. You have to do content marketing when it comes to SEO it’s one of the biggest things that you can do to affect whether or not your website comes up organically. But, SEO is a long term game.

Second, creating and optimizing content allows you to run paid ads to that content. It might be for Google Ads, it might be for Facebook. It might be for LinkedIn. It might even be content that you’re going to send in an email marketing chain. It can be in a variety of different places. The important thing is that you are consistently building content and then using that content to build a marketing funnel.

Choosing Content and What to Say

We use a checklist to determine what we’re going to write about and what format we’re going to put content in. Additionally, it addresses what we need to take into consideration once we load the content onto a website.

Checklist Items: Determining Content

Here, we’re figuring out what we need. An excellent resource is the Periodic Table of Content Marketing. It looks a little overwhelming, but there are tons of different types of content that can be done. Some types of content I didn’t even mention were slideshows, a webinar, a press release. Let’s pull this all the way over into maybe particular content that you write on LinkedIn. Maybe you’re doing some product base, maybe you’re doing some glossaries, or definitions that you have. Maybe you’re doing interviews. There’s a variety to choose from. Once you’ve determined the type of content needed, do the keyword research to back it up.

The format you choose for content doesn’t have to remain in that form. A piece of content could start out as a video and then be transformed into a blog – as we did here. Then, you take that blog post and turn it into an email blast. You can also take that blog post and run a Facebook ad against it. So you can reuse the same content over and over in several different places.

Interview from Client

Incorporate interviews into your content creation activities. Our list says interview the client but interviewing your sales reps is another way to go here. You could interview the person that interacts with a potential client. What are the objections that they commonly hear? What problems are you trying to solve for that client and how are you able to answer those problems using the content you’re creating?

Lay Out Content in the Order of What the Client Wants to Know Next

When putting content on the website there needs to be flow, a reflection of the next logical step for the client. So, how do you know what the next logical step is? When a client asks this my typical answer is: “What’s the next logical step when looking at your website page that this is the next question they might ask?”

To find out what’s next, we have keyword research that might be done in the Google Keyword Planner Tool. We have keyword research that might be done in SEMrush, a third-party tool. We can use tools like BuzzSumo which would give us information about what is trending right now. What are people sharing most often? There are alternatives to BuzzSumo that are out there as well. This is another great resource, AnswerThePublic a tool that gets us a list of questions people typically ask. All kinds of great information.

So this is everything that goes into determining what type of content and then what we’re going to write about it.

Content Page Optimization Checklist

Assign Content to a Writer and Web Developer

Once the content type and purpose are determined, it has to go over to a writer. The writer conducts research and establishes what’s currently ranking for a given topic. The writer then creates a cohesive piece of content. Once the writing is complete a web developer will get involved. She has to load the content onto the website, find relevant images and make sure the image does not affect site speed.

We want the writer to write in the most natural form and then we will come on top of the writer and make sure that we are putting the items in there to help with the, let’s say technical SEO.

Keyword Subject

So the keyword subject should be used at the beginning of the article and then it should be sprinkled throughout the rest of the article. Whenever we can make the keywords bold, where it makes sense, you always want to use logic.

Content Length

Content length is important but don’t blather if you don’t have to. It’s more important to make sure you thoroughly address the subject than it is to make sure you have 1,000 words. If you can address the subject in less than 1,000 and you feel like you’ve done a better job than the content that’s out there then you’ve done what you’ve needed to do. So you don’t always have to focus on those 1,000 words.

Internal and External Linking

We want to make sure that content is internally linked; meaning there’s probably other content on your website that is related to the current content. We want to make sure that we’re providing a link from one piece to another piece. On that same topic, we also want to provide external links. It’s okay to link to other sources if they’re good resources. It’s not going to hurt you, in fact, it can help you.

URL Structure Tells the Story

Next, we’re going to look at the URL structure. So this is going to be up at the top and the structure that we use in order to fill that URL, we want to make sure that that matches the H1 tag. Then right click and hit View Page Source, then we want to go to control F and H1 and we can see what’s the H1 that we are using. We can do the same thing for Title Tags and we can go in there and put title. Now we only have one H1 but you can have multiple H2s and we want to write it like a story. So we want the title of the book. We want the title of the chapters as one H1 and then the titles of the chapters are going to be your H2.

Visual Considerations – Break it Up

You’ll see visually here we’re breaking this up. We have made sure that images have alt tags, they are carrying the keywords that go along with that page. We’re making sure that people get visual cues from the content through bolded or listed content and as well as well placed graphics. People might not want to read your content, but they might want to quickly skim for specific information so you want to make sure you make it easy for them. In our particular example here we actually have the video right here as well. This is an example of where we took and made a video and then we turned it into a blog post and then we sent out an email on that blog post.

Categories, SEO for a Blog

Once that content gets completed, if it is a blog post, a couple of other things to consider. Make sure that you have a category indicated for your post. So you should only have one category per blog post. Keep SEO in mind. There should be categories that people would want to see.

You can see on our website we’ve actually already divided up the categories. So these are the categories that we write about which are actually typically services we offer. There’s more that we offer but we have content that’s related to those and so for us, you can click on those right there and you can lead right down to the content that is about that.

Publish but Don’t Bury the Blog

The worst thing you can do is publish all this content on your blog and have it buried in your blog where people can’t find the information quickly. People should be able to find the content that is in your blog and relate it to a service line or product elsewhere on your blog.

Annotate in Google Analytics

Once we have done all that we want to make sure we annotate that in Google Analytics. So, we’re definitely all about data here. We want to make sure that we are making ourselves a task to follow up in three months and see how the content we created is performing. Are we getting anything out of it? Are we gaining organic traffic? Probably someone in there, we have instantly posted it to social media, so all the organic posting, we might have run an ad against it, we might have sent an email out against it. We might be running Google Ads to it, those are all things that in order to promote the content.

Schema and Notify Google

Add schema markup. This is just a technical piece of code that’s telling Google what the information you posted on your website is. Of course, be sure to notify Google through Search Console that we do have this new page.

Conclusion

So lots of information on picking out content and optimizing content. A lot of thought goes into it. You have to have content when it comes to digital marketing, it’s one of your biggest drivers. You need to make sure you are providing the voice of the company.